For the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Battlefield Hardline, developer Visceral Games wants to “have a nice balance between the performance and the experience,” general manager Steve Papoutsis told IGN.

Visceral is leading development of all five platforms for Hardline — PC, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, and PS3 — and has no interest in creating a game "that makes anyone feel like they're playing a lesser version" of something else. Hardline creative director Ian Milham added, "We’re vigilante about keeping them all working and keeping them tight.”

When discussing how Visceral plans to make a comparable port of Hardline on older hardware, Papoutsis said, “since we're right in the middle of the development it's been pretty challenging,” but noted the team has been “making some good progress on it.”

Nobody would specify how maps or player counts would change, and if Hardline would make comparable changes to Battlefield 4’s reductions on previous-generation hardware.

That could be necessary, of course. Newer hardware is capable of things older machines aren’t. Papoutsis explained, “You kind of jam a bunch of stuff in for the [PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions] and you want to make it look amazing and then you've got to go balance it out for [360 and PS3] to make sure it runs at the frame rate we want and that it's the same experience.”

That could, of course, mean a smaller version of the same core ideas. For the most part, this worked well for Battlefield 4.

Milham noted, “I think if people go back and look at the games we've made, they're pretty tight across the different platforms. You know you can scrub between and there's not like some terribleness."